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Causes and consequences of signal divergence across species

I am broadly interested in why signals differ across species and the consequences of this variation for important evolutionary processes, such as the evolution of reproductive isolation, cooperation, and sensory biases. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University working with Anna Qvarnström, Animal Ecology, and a visiting researcher with Finn Hallböök, Neuroscience. In 2012, I completed my PhD in Trevor Price's lab at the University of Chicago and, from 2012-2014, completed a NSF research fellowship with Anna Qvarnström in Uppsala. I've been lucky enough to work in variety of songbird systems to explore:What factors lead to signal divergence
across species?

How do individuals come to recognize the (variable)
signals of other species?

What mechanisms focus learning onto relevant
signals?

Contact

davidjameswheatcroft "at" gmail "dot" com

david "dot" wheatcroft "at" ebc"dot" uu "dot" se

1) Associative learning and the evolution of alarm calls

Awareness of the alarm calls of surrounding species can prove greatly beneficial to individuals living in multi-species communities, because they can acquire critical information about predators from multiple sources.

Calls generally vary greatly across even closely
related species. Despite
dissimilarity across species, a combination of learning and recognition of common acoustic features allows
widespread communication. In extreme cases, communication between a pair of species may even promote call
convergence through copying or mimicry.

My work also addressed why alarm calls vary across species. We demonstrated that the
number and variety of receivers may strongly influence the rate and
nature of signal divergence: alarm calls directed at a narrower set of
receivers evolve at slower rates than those directed at a more diverse
set of receivers.

2) The role of innate auditory perception in song learning and speciation

I use playback experiments, acoustic analysis, and neurobiological methods to study the genetic and neural basis of auditory perception in two species of closely related, co-occurring songbirds, the pied (Ficedula hypoleuca) and collared flycatcher (F. albicollis).